Now-15 Members of Congress, 17 Companies and Associations File Updated Amendment to EPA Petition for Reconsideration

Following on the heels of last week’s Petition for Judicial Review filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the December 23, 2009 filing of a 28-page Petition for Reconsideration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) today filed an important Third Amendment to the Petition for Reconsideration with the EPA, challenging the Endangerment Finding on carbon dioxide emissions issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 2009. Included in the supplemental filing are blockbuster disclosures of scientific errors and potential fraud revealed to the public both before and since the EPA Endangerment Finding in December.

All legal documents and filings, as well as scientific background and reports, are available at www.epalawsuit.org. The complete list of plaintiff-petitioners follows this release.

A few highlights from the amended Petition include:

“The reliance by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the IPCC’s work is so extensive that revelations that undermine the credibility of the IPCC also inevitably impeach the credibility of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding....”

• A new report indicating widespread “station drop out” – stations that capture temperature data – in some cases, a 90 percent drop out, which skews temperature data; sampling bias toward warmer temperatures; improper adjustments to data and data manipulation; and, improper siting of temperature stations (in urban areas, for example).
• Clear evidence and public admissions of the following: mischaracterized results from scientific studies skewed to appear to endorse temperature increases – leading to public admissions by IPCC-related leaders of accident, overstatement, and manipulation of data.
• Overt error and potential fraud in IPCC reports promising a) extreme weather events increasing in frequency and severity; b) Himalayan glaciers melted by 2035; c) African crop yields collapse by 50 percent; and, d) Large swaths of Amazon rain forest would become dry savanna grassland.

“On behalf of 15 members of Congress and nearly 20 professional associations and companies and itself, Southeastern Legal Foundation has filed this important amendment to our Petition with the EPA to ensure a full and complete record of scientific mistakes, flaws, miscalculations, admissions and potential fraud by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the EPA relies completely for its Endangerment Finding,” said Shannon L. Goessling, SLF Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel (pronounced GUESS-ling).

“The reality is that the IPCC reports are crumbling beneath the weight of scientific exposure, and the EPA has tied itself to the IPCC reports lock, stock and barrel,” Goessling added. “The EPA and its Congressional overseers must open the books and reconsider the radical position it has taken on climate change regulations and carbon dioxide emissions – the man-made global warming ship is sinking under the weight of these disclosures.”

In 2009, SLF filed a comprehensive public comment during the Public Comment period throughout which the EPA allegedly considered powerful scientific information that counters the prevailing IPCC reports on man-made climate change based on carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. Despite thousands of scholarly submissions, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson published the Endangerment Finding in December.

Failure to investigate this new evidence that supports leading credible scientists' observations that “global warming”/climate change is not caused by humans (anthropogenic), but is natural, cyclical, and not as extreme as reported by the IPCC, creates significant legal problems for the EPA’s regulatory effort.

The EPA Endangerment Finding signals that draconian, costly regulations will be promulgated by the EPA in 2010 and beyond (according to reports, more than 600 pages of new mandates that will impose billions of dollars in costs and invasive burdens on American consumers and taxpayers).